National Sibling day was actually April 10th. I’m a little behind. I realized that day I didn’t have any fun old pictures of me with my siblings – I need to fix that next time I’m in Jesup. But I did have some pictures of Grace and Graham and so I put one out on Instagram. Believe it or not, sometimes it’s hard to get them both in the same frame. It also made me realize that I haven’t written about Grace and Graham lately.

They continue to evolve as brother and sister. Grace is a faithful taekwondo watcher, stealthy stealer of toys, and continues to drool at times on Graham’s belongings. For his part, Graham has developed a greater understanding of what it means to be Grace’s brother. The Friday before Easter when it was so cold Grace’s nurse left her hat and mittens at school. Her teacher went to find Graham in the after-school program and asked him to put the hat and mittens in his bag so that he could bring them home for her. It was the first thing he told me about when I came to pick him up. He was proud that Grace’s teacher had come looking for him.

There was a time when we left him for three days this winter to take Grace to Minnesota for doctor appointments. I wrote his kindergarten teacher the night before we were leaving to let her know he’d expressed some frustration at being left behind. She responded that he’d already told her and I was moved that he’d already enacted his own support team.

We have started attending a new church and as part of that, we’ve been taking a special needs parenting class. Grace and Graham are in the room down the hall from us those nights. The first night we took them Graham insisted that he have a magnet for Grace’s VNS in his pocket and that he had one of her chewy’s in his pocket. I was astounded.

My heart broke a little the day he told me that he missed our old church and wanted to go back there. I explained to him that maybe someday we could visit but right now we need a church that can better support Grace and that there’d be an opportunity to make new traditions this way. He simply said sadly. “OK, I get it”. But how could he?

And then I picture the two of them on our very cold spring break trip to St. Louis. We were at the zoo and had been checking out the penguins. I wanted to get Grace a stuffed penguin – she’s totally a fan. We, of course, walked out of the penguin house into the penguin gift shop. Graham knew we were buying a penguin for Grace and immediately went to work collecting penguins to show her so that she could pick. In the end, Grace got a penguin way bigger than what I imagined we’d come home with. But he showed us that she liked it best. He named the penguin Waddles.

He’s growing up so fast and sometimes Grace seems stuck. They sometimes are fine sitting side by side and they sometimes are not. Sometimes I can get them both in a picture and sometimes they want nothing to do with each other. We are getting a wheelchair van for Grace and although Graham wanted to help us pick it out he was ultimately ok with whatever was best for Grace as long it had a DVD player for him.

I love the two of them beyond what I can say. We’re working it out day by day. I’m determined that Graham will know we had some limits because of Grace but he will also know that Kevin and I pushed those limits as far as we could and that he was factored into every decision – because he is.